Posted by BlueSEO on January 29th, 2010

In November of 2007, Microsoft released a new service for webmasters who want to know more about how their websites are doing in the software giant’s search engine Live.com. The new service is called Live Search Webmaster Tools, and is used to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of websites, submit sitemaps and view statistics about site performance. Both Google and Yahoo have similar tools for webmasters and now Microsoft has followed suit. Just like its competitors, Microsoft’s webmaster tools are specific to the corporation’s own search engine.

Using Live Search Webmaster Tools, webmasters can:

* View the top 5 pages on their website according to Live Search
* Access the top 10 incoming links that are performing the best in Live Search
* Access the top 10 outgoing links that are performing the best in Live Search
* See if any site pages are blocked in the index
* Validate a robots.txt file
* See if any of their site pages are listed under a specified keyword in Live.Com, and when those pages were last crawled by the MSN bot.
* Either notify the Live Search crawler if they change an existing sitemap or add a new one.

MSN has promised webmasters “tons more features” that will allow them to measure their site performance.